The Professional Women’s Hockey League (PWHL) is a professional ice hockey league in North America in its second season currently featuring teams in Boston, Minnesota, Montréal, New York, Ottawa and Toronto, each with rosters featuring the best women’s hockey players in the world.
Launched on Jan. 1, 2024, the PWHL has already surpassed one million fans all-time, broken multiple attendance records, and holds the worldwide attendance record for a women’s hockey game. In 2024, the PWHL was recognized by Sports Business Journal as the Sports Breakthrough of the Year and received the top position in the first-ever Canadian edition of the Harris Poll, which ranks companies’ reputations.
Unique to the PWHL are its scoring system and rule innovations, putting emphasis on an exciting product that rewards competitive play and engages audiences worldwide.
League Point System:
PWHL teams earn standings points with a 3-2-1-0 system, critically rewarding regulation-time wins to incentivize competitive play for a full 60 minutes every night:
- A regulation win earns a team 3 points towards the league standings
- An overtime or shootout win earns a team 2 points
- Overtime or shootout losses earn 1 point
- Regulation losses earn 0 points
At the end of the regular season, the four teams with the most total standings points compete in the PWHL Playoffs, which consist of two best-of-five semi-finals, and the winners advancing to the best-of-five PWHL Finals for the Walter Cup.
Safety & Gameplay Innovations
The PWHL emphasizes player safety and innovative gameplay through a number of initiatives:
- Player Safety: Major Penalty and Game Misconduct is assessed as a default penalty for all illegal checks to the head during play, and will automatically initiate a further review with the PWHL Central Situation Room.
- Jailbreak Goal: A player serving a minor penalty can “break out” of the penalty box if their team scores a short-handed goal.
- No Escape Rule: Players on a team assessed a penalty that leads to penalty time on the clock are not permitted to change and must remain on the ice until after the following face-off.
Playoffs and Draft Innovations
- Playoff Opponent Selection: The No. 1 seed in the final standings heading into the PWHL Playoffs gets to choose their semi-final opponent between the third and fourth seeds.
- Gold Plan: The Gold Plan is an innovative system used to encourage competitive play by all teams throughout the full regular season. Once a team is mathematically eliminated from playoff contention, the standings points earned (using the league's 3-2-1-0 system) in their remaining regular-season games are classified as Draft Order Points. The non-playoff team with the most Draft Order Points earns the higher pick in the draft.
League Make-Up
In the 2024-25 season, the PWHL players includes 162 total players across six teams:
- 23 active roster players per team, plus up to 3 reserve players
- Representatives of 9 different countries:
- Canada: 77
- United States: 62
- Czechia: 9
- Sweden: 5
- Finland: 3
- Austria: 2
- Germany: 2
- France: 1
- Switzerland: 1
52 new players joined the league in 2024-25, including 34 directly turning pro from collegiate programs.